Data access and its implementation at Wendelstein 7-X

The increasing number of data acquisition stations and setups in laboratory environments at Wendelstein 7-X does already produce a considerable amount of data by now. Diagnosticians want to view the acquired data in a comfortable way and use them for calculations in their own test and analysis algorithms. To prepare for full operation of W7-X, a reasonable approach is to provide data access methods that stay as close as possible to the final data access concept. This requires taking care of the special needs of W7-X regarding continuously acquired data, segment based parameter switching and synchronization of data from different diagnostics. Therefore, a data access interface has been designed and implemented considering continuous data acquisition as well as usability and performance issues. The interface and its usage in different software environments (e.g. high level scientific programming languages) will be explained. Also, the integration of user defined off line analysis algorithms will be described. Additionally, the DataBrowser will be presented. The DataBrowser is a Java application that can browse continuously acquired data of different kind, provides several types of plots including zooming functions to display the data and the corresponding parameters and offers export functions to save selected data locally.